Amazon Aurora is now available to customers in AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) region. Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible relational database management system (RDBMS) that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora provides up to five times better performance than MySQL at a price point one tenth that of a high-end commercial RDBMS while delivering similar performance and availability.

Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR) is now available in the EU (Ireland) region. 

AWS CloudFormation has updated support for three services. You can now provision the following features using CloudFormation:

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) updated support

• Specify one or more transition rules for S3 buckets with versioning enabled. These define how S3 manages objects during their lifetime, such as automated transition of less-frequently accessed objects to low-cost storage alternatives and scheduled deletions.

AWS Lambda updated support

• Enable Lambda functions to access resources in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
• Publish a version of a Lambda function. Versioning allows you to better manage your in-production Lambda function code by enabling you to publish one or more versions of your Lambda function.
• Create an alias that points to a Lambda function version that you specify. An alias is a pointer to a specific Lambda function version.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) updated support

• Define the properties of Amazon Elastic Block Store storage volumes attached to your Amazon EMR instances, such as their configuration or whether they are I/O optimized.

AWS Config is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) region. AWS Config is a fully managed service that gives you an inventory of your AWS resources, notifies you when the configurations of your resources change, and lets you audit the history of the configurations for those resources to enable security and governance.

Dept. of Environmental Services investigation revealed major violations of the Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Act by Analytical Services Inc., located in Williston, Vt.

Support includes partnerships with United Way and Habitat for Humanity and employee-led initiatives.

The International Water Association (IWA) and International Desalination Association (IDA)
have agreed to cooperate in the coverage of desalination the IWA World Water Congress &
Exhibition 9 – 14 October 2016 in Brisbane, Australia.

EW called for volunteers who have never coded to run through the first exercise in the micro:bit guide for children – the Don’t steal… exercise. There are no children in Electronics Weekly Towers, so an adult bravely stepped up. She has experience writing web pages in HTML, but none in any programming language. And, having …

EW test – micro:bit might lead to frustration

Vantablack, the world’s blackest material, from Surrey NanoSystems, no longer has to be placed by chemical vapour deposition (CVD) as it can now be sprayed on. It is based on carbon naontubes. “Called Vantablack S-VIS, the spray paint greatly widens the applications potential, making it possible to coat much larger and more complex shapes and structures, as …

Blackest coating now sprayable

I have been struggling to find any details of the MPLab Xpress Evaluation Board that Microchip is promoting alongside its new web-based version of its MPLAB integrated development environment. Apart from it having a PIC16F18855 on-board. But I did get sent a close-up photo of it, so I though I would stick it here. Done. By …

Microchip’s Xpress eval board